Thursday, June 25, 2009

I've said before, repeatedly, that you must rename your blog with great care, if it's mature and / or has any reputation. Don't go changing the blog URL without planning the change, if you hope to keep your readers or search engine reputation. That admonition applies, likewise, to a blog with Followers, since people Follow blogs, not people.

If you look at your Reading List, Google Reader Subscription List, or any other newsfeed client, you'll see blog feeds which are based upon the blog URL. With a new blog name comes a new blog URL, and a new feed URL. Your Followers won't have the updated blog feed in their Reading List, or anywhere else that matters - unless you advise them to change their subscription.

Since the Follower to blog relationship is maintained by blogID, a staged development / test strategy, using a new blog, may not be a good idea. Where a new blog is developed with major changes, your Followers would be left Following a dormant blog.

After you change the blog URL, and the old URL is now free, publish a stub blog to the old URL. Include a notice that the blog has moved, and provide the new URL in the notice, with a clickable link. This will let your Followers and subscribers know to change their subscriptions, and will provide a link for the search engines to follow.

To complement the visual redirect for the blog readers, you can use the Post Feed Redirect URL from the stub, to redirect the blog feed. This will let your Followers and subscribers continue to read the blog feed, using the old feed URL to access the new feed URL.

18 comments:

Hi Chuck - unfortunately I did not find your blog until after I changed my URL. You've provided a wealth of information that I wish I had found earlier.

My blogspot URL is exactly the same (petiteasiangirl.blogspot.com) but I did change the URL forwarding from www.petiteasiangirl.com to www.extrapetite.com last month. After that, my followers stopped receiving updates.

I don't know how to post a stub to my old URL because I never had any hosting on it - always used blogger. Can you suggest anything for me to do now that the mistake has already been made? I looked through your responses on the blogger help forum and only found references back to this post. Thank you in advance!

I want to shorten the name of my blog as it's way too long but keep it on blogspot and not buy a domain name. It seems simple enough to log into my account and change the name but I've now learned that my followers won't transfer over... everything else will though, correct? All my content and widgets etc?? EVERYTHING but my followers?Maybe I'm missing something here but to insure that I don't lose any followers, if I FIRST blogged using my old blog name that I'll be changing my name to .......... and to please resubscribe to that blog, wouldn't that solve the problem? Or is it a case of " If it sounds too simple it probably is!" REALLY hope someone can help me out here!

Any time you change the URL of the blog, the page rank and search reputation, for the new URL, will start out as 0.0000. The old URL will appear in search results, for a while - linking to a non existent blog.

You will need to aggressively convince the search engines to update, as quickly as possible.

From what I see on your blog, both Linky and Networked Blogs are gadgets which reference your account on their service.

That being the case, the gadget on your blog should work equally well with the blog published to any URL. It would not be a bad idea though for you to check your profile in those services, and see if you registered your BlogSpot URL there. If so, you'd want to change that registration - and that might involve re verifying blog ownership, in their service.